Google adds Octane to JavaScript benchmark mix

The Octane benchmark's simple-to-read progress and results page There are many benchmark suites for JavaScript which all give different perspectives on how a particular implementation of JavaScript is running on a browser. Google has now launched the Octane JavaScript benchmark suite to add to those perspectives with what it feels is a realistic selection of regularly used JavaScript-implemented web applications. The company is taking the full, mostly unadulterated code of the applications and turning them into benchmarks. The only changes made to the applications are the addition of glue logic and emulation of canvas/DOM interaction.

The "realistic" tests are Box2DWeb, a JavaScript port of the 2D physics engine; Mandreel, a 3D bullet engine converted from C++ to JavaScript using the Mandreel software; Pdf.js, which uses Mozilla's PDF reader to test decoding speed of sample PDF documents; GB Emulator, which uses an open source Game Boy emulator running a 3D demo; and CodeLoad, a measure of JavaScript engine startup speeds based on Closure and jQuery. They are complemented by the benchmarks that were part of Google's V8 benchmark suite; these more traditional benchmarks include an OS kernel simulation, constraint solver, raytracing, regular expressions, crypto functions and data manipulation.

For those interested in the internals of the BSD-licensed Octane benchmark, a Google Code project contains the source and issue tracker. A compatibility page shows known issues on various browsers, both desktop and mobile. Most of the new tests (pdf.js, GB Emulator and Mandreel) require a complete implementation of WebGL Typed Arrays to function which does cause issues with some slightly older browsers.

(djwm)